Andrew Grant

Over the last week I set myself a mini-project of making three improvements to my Windows Media Center setup.

1. Compress recorded shows older than 30 days in WMV to save space.
2. Moved older shows (compressed or not) to a network share to save space.
3. Virtualizing Media Center under Windows Home Server

The results? Complete failure on the first two, and some success on the third but that was ultimately dependent on getting #2 working.

This one of those experiences with Media Center when I start to look at the price of a Season 3 TiVo + lifetime pass. My Media Center’s over three years old now I’ve basically been holding off till a nice (e.g. small) CableCard system becomes available, and/or I know it’ll still work with protected content after upgrading to Windows 7.

I’m happy to trade the out-of-the-box convenience of TiVo for the increased flexibility of Media Center, but at times Media Center seems to have difficulty with scenarios that are clearly popular and this gets frustrating. I love Media Center, but it does seem to have an identity problem.

Anyhow, here are my experiences;

Compress older shows to WMV

Using MCEBuddy I had the compression step working in almost no time at all. MCEBuddy is a really nice program that’s well done – simple to use and setup. I chose the WMV compression option since it would cover all of my devices (Windows Media Center, Extenders and the XBox) and set it to convert a few really old 50+ day programs.

After it’d completed I noticed that the shows were no longer visible in the “Recorded TV” section, despite being in the same location with the same filename. After much puzzling and Googling, it turns out that Media Center will only show DVR-MS in the “Recorded TV” section.

Yeah, there are meta-data aspects to consider but this limitation is a bit annoying. Being limited to using the “Video” section, whose interface is poor and needs careful categorization to be useful, makes this rapidly lose its appeal. It’s a shame because this (background WMV encoding) could be a killer feature for Media Center.

Move old shows to a network share

Accessing a network share and moving old files here is super-easy, but getting Media Center to display those shows is complex and something I just couldn’t get working.

There’s a large number of “how to” guides that cover the the numerous steps and registry and/or policy editor tweaks needed on the both machines, but for whatever reason it would just never work. I added the watched locations correctly and could see/open the files in Explorer, but to Media Center they just did not exist and would not appear in the Recorded TV section.

In the past I’ve found Media Center’s support for network-shared media is poor, and this seems to be another example. For a digital home product I have trouble understanding why this is the case, though at least this does seem to be changed in Windows 7

Quick follow my post about running a virtual copy of Windows Media Center;

• I don’t think the high CPU percentages were related to disk access. One of my early concerns was disk performance which I tested with Disk Throughput Tester (Disk TT) and I didn’t notice any CPU problems
• I think it’s more likely the CPU usage is just a case of VM performance not being that good with the setup of VMware/Motherboard/CPU. I’m not familiar with the intricacies, but I know my other PC has an option for hardware virtualization in the BIOS that isn’t present on the box I was testing with.
• The reference to "somewhat successfully" running Home Server under VM was a mistake, for some reason I recalled the post I linked to making mention of connector and performance problems which isn’t the case. I would still be extremely leery of this setup though, if the Media Center drive fails then any recovery is going to be painful.
• I definitely think this setup has potential, but only if you’re willing to invest in better hardware (high-end Core 2 Duo / Quad Core) with better virtualization support. That requires a bigger box and my aim was to try and get both systems running in the you-have-to-see-it-to-appreciate-it Media Smart Server box.

At this point I’m going to explore plan B – an ultra-small Windows Media Center computer that uses Windows Home Server shares for storage.

I’m thinking of a Dell Studio Hybrid, perhaps a Mac Mini, or even a self-build machine based around an Atom processor. As it’ll be used in conjunction with external storage, tuners, and extenders, it doesn’t need to roar – just to be very very small

Like everyone with both Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center boxes I’d pay a good chunk of cash to have both in a single box featuring shared storage, cablecard support, and a small and eco-friendly footprint. A very good chunk.

A few people have (somewhat) successfully virtualized Windows Home Server on their Windows Media Center box but while I admire their cunning there’s potentially a rather ugly problem. If the OS drive for WMC should ever fail you have a chicken-and-egg situation. No WMC = No WHS = No restore from backup.

I think a better scenario then is to have Windows Media Center running as a service on the Home Server box with all output being through one or more extenders. With a few constraints I couldn’t think of any reason why this wouldn’t work so I decided to give it a go

Note the following were required;

1. A VM package that supports USB devices and can be run as a service.
2. USB Tuners
3. Acceptance of being limited to extenders, and not being able to record protected digital content (for the same reasons you can’t record digital content with a custom-built box).

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It seems everywhere has sold out of the first batch of the new Linksys V2 Media Center Extenders. The best I can find is pcalchemy which has an in-stock date of next Friday.

According to statistics one in five PCs will suffer a fatal hard drive failure in their lifetime. Last week our Media Center was one of them.

Fortunately it was the disk containing the OS and not the larger disk that holds all of our media. And while it did take 6-7 hours to reinstall and set everything up again, it would have been far more painful had it been my main PC or my girlfriend’s laptop. With those machines there’s also a pretty good chance we’d have lost something more important than just our TV recording schedule.

Before now my backup strategy was to keep mirrored copies of important files on seperate computers via FolderShare. This prevented us from losing our documents, photos or music, but it didn’t guard against disk failure or an accidental overwrite. I thought it best to take the Media Center failure as a warning shot from fate and move to a better backup strategy.

Enter Windows Home Server.

I received an invite to the Windows Home Server beta a few weeks ago so now seemed like the perfect time to try it out. My aim was to build a WHS machine that would run nightly backups of our three machines, and act as a centralized storage location for all of our media and some large datasets that I use for work.

Over the next week or so I’m going to write about actually setting up and configuring the machine, using it to backup our PCs (including my girlfriends Mac), and integrating the shared media with our Media Center PC.

However this first post is about choosing the best hardware configuration for Windows Home Server, something I spent considerable time researching.

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